Re: gEDA-user: How to divide large symbols in smaller units?

[Ben Jackson <ben@xxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jun 21, 2007 at 12:13:50AM +0200, Stefan Salewski wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, den 20.06.2007, 14:04 -0700 schrieb Ben Jackson:
>
> > (btw, I considered Spartan 3E, but the Cylcone 2 seemed to have a lot
> > of advantages to the hobbiest)
>
> Can you please explain what the advantages of Alteras Cyclone II are?

Here are some of the things I remember:

Both have free tools, but I think Quartus II is nicer.  I've used ISE
and EDK extensively for work, so I'm not unfamiliar with them, but I
prefer Quartus II.

The "EDK equivalent" in Altera land is SOPC Builder.  You can get a free
web version of that (you can't get EDK free).

If you allow the Quartus II tools to do their "talkback" feature (sends
design summaries to Altera) then you get free access to SignalTap (equiv
of Chipscope, which you cannot get for free).  This is huge, imo.

I like Nios II, but that's not free.

The price/performance of Cyclone II seems better than Spartan-3 to me
(though there are many generations of Spartan 3 and I don't know much
about 3E, looks like XC3S500E might be parity with the EP2C8, but they
were (and still are) not in stock at digikey in PQ208).

All Xilinx parts want a 2.5V VCCAUX.  So you're going to need VCCIO,
VCCINT and VCCAUX for any Xilinx part, and if VCCIO is not 2.5 (eg
3.3V in my project) then you need 3 voltages.  The Altera parts have
a single core voltage.  The PLLs need an "analog supply", but it's the
same voltage as the core and you can make it with some caps and a bead.

-- 
Ben Jackson AD7GD
<ben@xxxxxxx>
http://www.ben.com/


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